I was born in Hammersmith in 1952 and my family moved to South Harrow around 1958.
Upon leaving secondary modern school in 1969 I enrolled as a full-time student in Foundation Studies at Harrow School of Art, where I gained a Certificate in Foundation Studies.
From 1971-1974 I studied painting at Canterbury College of Art in Kent, where I gained a Dip. A.D. in Fine Art (Painting).
After leaving art college, I drifted away from fine art. I worked in several manual jobs until the mid nineteen-eighties when I began working as a layout artist, designing pages for a nationally distributed retail catalogue. I continued in that line of work until November 2014, when I decided to take early retirement in order to concentrate on painting.
Most of my student work at Canterbury had been abstract/non-representational. However, when my interest in art was rekindled in the late nineteen-eighties, I tended towards a more figurative style and worked mostly in pencil, colour pencil and watercolour, to draw still-life and surrealistic landscapes.
I became a member of The Society for Art of the Imagination between 2002 to 2007, being represented in four of their annual exhibitions over that period. I also exhibited drawings in two open exhibitions, held in 2005 and 2006, at the Royal Society of Birmingham Artists gallery.
I began to feel dissatisfied with the figurative work I was producing. I felt the sense of mystery I was trying to evoke could be achieved in a better and more direct way through non-representational paintings, which do not have the ‘literary’ distraction of representational pictures. My work became almost exclusively non-representational.
I exhibited seven of my non-representational paintings at Bromley Arts Council Ripley Arts Centre in Bromley from 9th January to 4th February 2018.
While I continue my non-representational work, I have recently re-evaluated my opinion about the validity of my earlier representational paintings, and have started to produce figurative work again.
In these recent figurative paintings and drawings, I portray objects or people in slightly unusual, quirky or unexpected situations, which may encourage the viewer not to take the common-place for granted.